Monday, August 22. 2005Journal Publishing and Author Self-Archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence and Fruitful CollaborationTrackbacks
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ANDRAS HOLL:
A few reflections on the letter "Journal Publishing and Author Self-Archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence and Fruitful Collaboration" by Berners-Lee et al. 2005) I would expect the number of subscriptions to drop if scholarly journal contents become freely available on the web, and am somewhat puzzled that this is not happening in the field of physics & astronomy (which is my own field). Moreover, I can add my personal experience concerning a small, very specialised research journal, of which I am the technical editor. The Information Bulletin on Variable Stars (http://www.konkoly.hu/IBVS/IBVS.html) has been appearing on paper since 1961. First it was distributed free of charge, then a subscription fee was introduced in 1991, and at the end of 1994 it became freely available on the Internet. The number of distributed paper copies has remained surprisingly constant through all those changes. Some libraries who dropped their subscriptions after 1994 re-subscribed a couple of years later, and one has even ordered the issues missed after the initial cancellation. Why we do not see an effect of free archives (arXiv) in physics on journal subscriptions? My hunch is, that there will be an effect, only the response is slow: because (i) the availability of an extensive free archive is restricted to a few disciplines; (ii) librarians themselves are uneasy about the move towards a self-service scenario, where scientist "do not need libraries any longer"; (iii) or they are waiting for the "dust to settle", wanting to reach stable, long-term solutions; (iv) policy makers at universities, research institutes might not be fully aware of the possibilities; (v) or they are, only worry about the consequences they think possible, such as the demise of journals. I think in the long term the market of scientific publishing must and will change. There will be no market for journals published with big profits. Either the publishers adapt, or disappear. The research society will either buy publishing services from a publisher (if they can offer a better price or quality than self-publishing) [see the case of The Astrophysical Journal, published by the Univ. of Chicago Press for the American Astronomical Society], or there will be a move towards self-publishing: publishing by learned societies, etc. The research community, if they want to preserve existing journals published by commercial publishers, they might buy or take them over, or, agree in a cost-sharing scheme with the publisher: higher page charges, free archiving/free electronic access, lower subscription fees. I strongly believe that research institutes, universities, learned societies are able to publish their own journals. This belief is based on my experience with the small journal I am involved with, the IBVS. This journal has all the features commercial publishers claim their exclusive characteristics: peer review, editorial control, high visibility, rich features in the electronic version. Andras Holl
STEVAN HARNAD:
Self-Archive Now, Speculate Later Andras Holl speculates about why there has been no effect of self-archiving on journal subscriptions, predicting there will one day be an effect (but without providing any further evidence). He may or may not be right, but he is certainly wrong about one thing: Self-publishing (i.e. vanity press) cannot and will not replace peer reviewed journals. Peer review necessarily requires a neutral, answerable third party administering the process, not the author/institution vetting its own output. Moreover, at a time when the pressing problem is that only 15% of annual articles are being self-archived, what we need is not more speculation about economics or peer review, but more self-archiving -- which is what the RCUK self-archiving policy that is under discussion here is designed to do. Andras Holl is in a lucky (or intelligent) discipline that has made more progress in self-archiving than most others. Stevan Harnad
PETER BURNHILL:
This is an important and welcome argument about how to support scholarly communication in the most effective manner: to enable timely communication and to enable longevity of access to such communication. I think it is important to distinguish 'communication between peers' from other purposes of dissemination of results, where the value of formal publication will always win out. A little over ten years ago I was co-author to a paper that reported investigation into the relation between research activity and publication. A reference is given below, both to the published article which may be available on your local library shelf (or not, as the journal is not universally taken) and to a pre-print version which is available online (but which is I regret is based on scanning a poor original). I therefore feel confident that anyone who can decipher sufficient meaning and value from the online version will be motivated to obtain access to (a print or electronic) version of the article from the journal in question. [I await being told that I should have self-archived more effectively ![]() One of the principal arguments made in that paper is that publications, and I confess that we called them 'printed publications' (but that was back in 1994), communicate research findings to research peers and serve to enlighten client groups'. The elapsed time from 'findings' to publication date may serve to undermine productivity in the first, but may be much better suited to the second. We presented some empirical light on this in the paper. Another argument, illustrated graphically, was that peer review occurs throughout the research activity and research publication process. It is not only at the point of acceptance. Citation is important in itself. However, the value of citation counts as measures of research impact is over-rated - as I hope the arguments in the paper demonstrate, at least for the social sciences - as at 1994! I wonder if the position is different now. Peter Burnhill P M Burnhill and M E Tubby-Hille (1994). "On measuring the relation between social science research activity and research publication," Research Evaluation 4(3), 130-152. (1.9mb pdf file download- scanned version of annotated typescript) available under 'RAPID' at http://www.edina.ac.uk/projects/#previous
STEVAN HARNAD:
Peter Burnhill ( PB ) writes: ---- PB: "This is an important and welcome argument about how to support scholarly communication in the most effective manner: to enable timely communication and to enable longevity of access to such communication." Open access self-archiving is not needed or intended solely or even primarily to enable either timely communication or access-longevity. It is to enable access itself, for all would-be users who cannot afford access to the journal version. Of course the access should also be immediate (hence the timeliness) and sustained into the future too (but the primary longevity burden is on the journal version for the time being, not the author's self-archived supplement). ---- PB: "I think it is important to distinguish 'communication between peers' from other purposes of dissemination of results, where the value of formal publication will always win out." The articles in question are primary research, published in peer-reviewed journals. It is hence not "informal publication" vs. "formal publication," but access provision -- to all stages of the research but most importantly the version that has been refereed and accepted for publication. The primary intended audience for peer-reviewed journal articles is fellow-researchers, peers; and the primary purpose is that those should use and apply and build upon and cite the author's research in their own subsequent research and articles. This (among other things) maximises the research impact of both the author and the work. There are other reasons for and benefits of open-access self-archiving (providing access to students, teachers, the general public, the developing world), but these are secondary and in any case come with the territory. ---- PB: "A little over ten years ago I was co-author to a paper that reported investigation into the relation between research activity and publication... One of the principal arguments made in that paper is that publications... communicate research findings to research peers and serve to enlighten client groups'. The elapsed time from 'findings' to publication date may serve to undermine productivity in the first, but may be much better suited to the second." The article (from a quick scan) looks interesting, but seems focussed mainly on timing. Because the article was not OCR'd, I could not grep for "client" to find out what you meant by that: I cannot imagine what users would benefit from a delay, but my quess is that you just meant the delay between preprint and peer-review, and that's not really at issue here, since the peer-reviewed draft is the principle target of OA self-archiving, but peer-review is certainly a benefit worth waiting for. ---- PB: "Another argument, illustrated graphically, was that peer review occurs throughout the research activity and research publication process. It is not only at the point of acceptance." Yes, drafts get revised, both before and after peer review, and all updates can be self-archived too. ---- PB: "Citation is important in itself. However, the value of citation counts as measures of research impact is over-rated - as I hope the arguments in the paper demonstrate, at least for the social sciences - as at 1994! I wonder if the position is different now." Yes, it is different now -- and will be even more different when OA self-archiving prevails, and provides this rich digital database for developing powerful new research performance indicators. You might start with: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/harnad/ Stevan Harnad
Probably a lot, I would guess the majority. There are 24,000 research journals (figure taken from the rebuttal). I would guess that the vast majority of these are highly specialized. I would further speculate from knowledge of my own field (Computer Science) that researchers in specialized fields tend to be concentrated in a relatively small number of institutions, rather than evenly distributed across the world's 8000 research institutions.
DON SANNELLA:
In the spirit of point-by-point logical analysis and rebuttal, let me point out what I think are some flaws and weaknesses in the Southampton Rebuttal to the ALPSP Open Letter on the RCUK Policy Proposal. I'm not against self-archiving - even though my interest in this whole area is related to my role as editor-in-chief of an Elsevier journal (self-archiving status "green") - and I don't have a problem with many of the other points made, but I think these particular points are wrong and an argument with weak/wrong points is a weak argument. 1. I believe that the following fundamental element of the argument, from near the beginning of the Southampton Rebuttal (henceforth REBUTTAL: ) to ALPSP, is incorrect: REBUTTAL: "(The reader is reminded, at this early point in our critique, that it is impossible for a piece of research to be read, used, applied and cited by any researcher who cannot access it. Research access is a necessary (though not a sufficient) condition for research impact.)" Read: yes. Used, applied, cited: no, for the following reasons. -- Pay-access paper X might be read by researcher A who builds on it and reports the result in free-access paper Y. Researcher B might read Y without having access to X, and B's use/application of results in Y may well be indirectly use/application of results in X. For that reason among others it would not be at all unusual for B to cite both X and Y. -- People very often cite papers without reading them, just in order to add some weight to a bibliography. 2. REBUTTAL: "Journals provide access to all individuals and institutions that can afford to subscribe to them, and that is fine. But what about all the other would-be users -- those researchers world-wide whose institutions happen to be unable to afford to subscribe to the journal in which a research finding happens to be published? There are 24,000 research journals and most institutions can afford access only to a small fraction of them." Here and throughout you are ignoring the fact that journals are publicly accessible via public libraries and interlibrary loan. One doesn't need to subscribe to a journal in order to get access to its content. (Obviously it is more convenient if I can get access without leaving my desk, but that is a different story.) You are also ignoring the fact that such figures take no account of the extremely uneven distribution of researchers in specialized fields across institutions. A journal in a highly specialized field (as most of these 24,000 journals must be) which is subscribed to by 100 libraries might actually reach the vast majority of researchers working in that particular field. 3. ALPSP: '[2] Citation statistics and the resultant impact factors are of enormous importance to authors and theirinstitutions; they also influence librarians' renewal/cancellation decisions. Both the Institute of Physics and the London Mathematical Society are therefore troubled to note an increasing tendency for authors to cite only the repository version of an article, without mentioning the journal in which it was later published .' REBUTTAL: "Librarians' decisions about which journals to renew or cancel take into account a variety of comparative measures, citation statistics being one of them [...] journals carrying self-archived articles will have higher impact factors, and will hence perform better under this measure in competing for their share of libraries' serials budgets. This refutes example [2]. "As to the proper citation of the official journal version: This is merely a question of proper scholarly practice, which is evolving and will of course adapt naturally to the new medium [...] Moreover, publishers and institutional repositories can and will easily work out a collaborative system of pooled citation and reference statistics -- all credited to the official published version. So that is no principled obstacle either. This is all just a matter of adapting scholarly practices naturally to the new medium (and is likewise inevitable)." (This also relates to the argument against [1].) This argument depends on a belief that proper scholarly practice will evolve in a direction different from that in which it has demonstrably been evolving lately, and that institutional repositories will collaborate on citation statistics, quickly enough to counter the problem that ALPSP is referring to before it leads to subscription cancellations. This seems pretty shaky to me, despite the assertion that it is inevitable: why is it likely that these things will happen at all, and why should they happen quickly? 4. ALPSP: '[4] The BMJ Publishing Group has noted a similar effect; the journals that have been made freely available online on publication have suffered greatly increased subscription attrition, and access controls have had to be imposed to ensure the survival of these titles.' REBUTTAL: "Exactly the same reply as above: The risks of making 100% of one journal's official, value-added contents free online while all other journals are not doing likewise has nothing whatosever to do with anarchic self-archiving, by authors, of the final drafts of their own articles, distributed randomly across journals." (This also relates to the arguments against [3] and [5].) You correctly argue that there is a difference between the effect of self-archiving and a publisher making 100% of content freely available. But this is far from the same as the two things having "nothing whatsoever" to do with each other, as you assert here and in the following passage from near the beginning of the letter: REBUTTAL: "the prior ALPSP critique of the RCUK proposal (April 19) was followed on July 1 by a point-by-point rebuttal. The reader who compares the two cannot fail to notice certain recurrent themes that ALPSP keeps ignoring in their present critique. In particular, 3 of the 5 examples that ALPSP cites below as evidence of the negative effects of self-archiving on journals turn out to have nothing at all to do with self-archiving, exactly as pointed out in the earlier rebuttal." Don Sannella
STEVAN HARNAD:
Don Sannella makes several points: ---- DS: "Researchers can and do cite and use research they have not read." This is undoubtedly true, but it is not at all clear whether this fact is something to be proud of or tout. And what fraction of the total research access problem does anyone seriously imagine that this iffy practice takes care of? ---- DS: "Those without access can go to a library." Is DS seriously proposing that in the Internet age -- when researchers' fingers are doing the walking and all research articles can be at their fingertips instantly -- the researcher whose institution cannot afford a subscription should walk to a library (somewhere) for every click performed by the researcher whose institution can afford a subscription? (Another suggestion worthy of Marie Antoinette!) ---- DS: "In some narrow specialities, most researchers might have access." How much of the total research article literature do you really think that covers (and what about the rest)? ---- DS: "How can we be sure scholars will cite the right version, and that statistics will be pooled and credited to the published version" Leave it to the research community. They stand to lose even more than publishers if wrong versions are cited and citations are not credited to their publications. ---- DS: "Publishers giving away the full contents of the journal version is not the same as authors self-archiving their final drafts, but is it really true these have "nothing whatosever" to do with each other?" On all the evidence to date, the answer is indeed, nothing. No cancellation effects from self-archiving, even in the few subfields where it has been going on for fifteen years and is near or at 100%. And the effects of journal give-aways is mixed: Some report increased cancellations, some report increased subscriptions. The picture may (or may not) change when we are near 100% self-archiving for 100% of the literature. No one knows. What is already known, however, is that self-archiving provides dramatic benefits for research and researchers. It is certain that free access to the author's version is optimal for research. If it should ever turn out not to be optimal for publishing, publishing can and will adapt. Stevan Harnad
DON SANNELLA:
I would like to respond to Stevan Harnad's ( SH ) replies to my ( DS ) earlier message. ---- DS: "Researchers can and do cite and use research they have not read." -------- SH: "This is undoubtedly true" ... So what is the effect on the rebuttal? The assertion that this is impossible is a fundamental element in the whole argument that the rebuttal is making. -------- SH: "but it is not at all clear whether this fact is something to be proud of or tout. ... I never said it was -- that's a completely different topic. -------- SH: ... "And what fraction of the total research access problem does anyone seriously imagine that this iffy practice takes care of?" From my fairly extensive experience with editorial work I think a significant fraction of citations in published papers are of this nature. ---- DS: "Those without access can go to a library." -------- SH: "Is DS seriously proposing that in the Internet age -- when researchers' fingers are doing the walking and all research articles can be at their fingertips instantly -- the researcher whose institution cannot afford a subscription should walk to a library (somewhere) for every click performed by the researcher whose institution can afford a subscription? (Another suggestion worthy of Marie Antoinette!)" Of course - as I already said - I agree that it is more convenient to have access without walking anywhere, and I hardly ever visit my own institution's library physically even though it is in the same building as my office. I was responding to a specific point in the rebuttal, which was asking how readers whose institutions don't subscribe to a journal can get access to its content. Online access was not the topic. (I find the Marie Antoinette offensive and inappropriate in the context of this discussion, by the way.) ---- DS: "In some narrow specialities, most researchers might have access. -------- SH: "How much of the total research article literature do you really think that covers" ... Probably a lot, I would guess the majority. There are 24,000 research journals (figure taken from the rebuttal). I would guess that the vast majority of these are highly specialized. I would further speculate from knowledge of my own field (Computer Science) that researchers in specialized fields tend to be concentrated in a relatively small number of institutions, rather than evenly distributed across the world's 8000 research institutions. -------- SH: ... "(and what about the rest)?" That's what Interlibrary Loan was designed for. If the problem is that the interlibrary loan system needs to change to take account of new technology, then why not complain about that? By the way, the main substance of my original point was that the rebuttal ignores access to research articles that is not via a researcher's own institution's journal subscription, and the extremely uneven distribution of researchers in specialized fields across institutions. SH's response to the former complaint attempts to change the subject rather than addressing it; the latter is just my speculation. ---- DS: "How can we be sure scholars will cite the right version, and that statistics will be pooled and credited to the published version?" -------- SH: "Leave it to the research community. They stand to lose even more than publishers if wrong versions are cited and citations are not credited to their publications." I'll believe it when I see it. "They stand to lose" refers to authors whose work is being cited. "Wrong versions are cited" refers to different people, namely authors of papers that cite this work. "Citations are not credited" refers to the people who control institutional repositories. So you are actually saying that A stands to lose if B and C don't go out of their way to do something, and therefore we can count on B and C doing so. (Of course B may in turn be cited by D, at which point A and B are in the same boat, but I don't notice that fact having any affect on the correctness of B's citations as ALPSP notes.) Personally I wouldn't bet a lot of money on this happening any time soon. And you are asking ALPSP to believe that it will happen before the problem ALPSP it is referring to leads to subscription cancellations. And then you are complaining that ALPSP doesn't accept your arguments no matter how many times you repeat them. ---- DS: "Publishers giving away the full contents of the journal version is not the same as authors self-archiving their final drafts, but is it really true these have "nothing whatosever" to do with each other?" -------- SH: "On all the evidence to date, the answer is indeed, nothing. No cancellation effects from self-archiving" ... [followed by more stuff that I am not disputing ...] My point here was slightly different: the rebuttal argues one thing (A is not the same as B) and then asserts a stronger thing (A has nothing whatsoever to do with B) as if these two things were the same, and they aren't. But I think this is a minor issue; I only mentioned it in the first place because the rebuttal made a big deal about the fact that ALPSP stubbornly seems not to have accepted the latter assertion despite having been given the former argument. Don Sannella
STEVAN HARNAD (SH):
---- Don Sannella (DS): "a significant fraction of citations in published papers [were]... not read [by the author citing them]." No doubt. And there may even exist a significant number of citations of papers that don't exist. But the point being made here is not about scholarliness or unscholarliness. There is an empirical effect to be accounted for: Papers that are self-archived are cited 50-250% more than papers (published in the same journal and year) that are not self-archived. http://citebase.eprints.org/isi_study/ http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/lab/chawki/graphes/EtudeImpact.htm That is not only a (statistically) significant percentage, it is a (numerically) substantial percentage. By what causal chain does DS imagine that providing free online access to a paper leads to more researchers citing that paper without their actually reading it -- compared to equivalent papers (same journal/year) to which free online access is not provided? (It's not impossible; it no doubt happens sometimes: The title and author may look relevant to a paper in progress, so they get added into some parenthesis. But please, let's be realistic about what proportion of the 50-250% advantage is likely to arise from that sort of behaviour, rather than making too much of a minority practice. Surely the less far-fetched inference is that the free full-text access is used to read papers that the user could not otherwise afford to access, rather than just to cite them, unread. One can, after all, access the author/title citation metadata in a free research index like Scirus http://www.scirus.com/srsapp/ (which does not offer full-text access to items that are not self-archived) or even Google Scholar http://scholar.google.com/ if one is merely bent on citing papers sight unseen. That leaves the 50-250% advantage unexplained.) -------- SH: "Is DS seriously proposing that in the Internet age... the researcher whose institution cannot afford a subscription should walk to a library (somewhere) for every click performed by the researcher whose institution can afford a subscription?" ---- DS: "I agree that it is more convenient to have access without walking anywhere... [but] Online access was not the topic." On the contrary, online access was very much the topic: Open access is defined as free online access: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#openaccess It does not concern access to the print edition (although users can of course print off the free online version for themselves if they wish). It was the advent of the online era that opened up the radical new possibility for researchers to maximise the access to (and thereby the impact of) their research by supplementing the publisher's paid versions (both print and online) with a free online version of their own final drafts for those would-be users whose institutions cannot afford access to the paid version. Hence the issue is not merely one of "convenience," since research access is the researcher's daily bread, time is money, and it would already be absurd to imagine relegating the have-not researchers to slogging over to each paper with their feet while their colleagues and competitors are doing it instantly with their fingers. But even that is not the point, for the target constituency here is those researchers whose institutions cannot afford paid access to either version, print or online. (That was what earned DS the not-undeserved quip about Marie Antoinette, to which I will shortly return.) ---- DS: "I would guess that the vast majority of researchers already have access." To test your quess, please look at the Ulrich's data on the number of journals that exist, across disciplines, worldwide: http://www.ulrichsweb.com/ulrichsweb/analysis/ and compare it with the number of journals that institutions can actually afford: http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/arl/index.html Again, the 50-250% impact advantage of the articles that have author self-archived supplements would seem to imply that the "minority" that do not already have paid access (because their institutions cannot afford it) may be a pretty vast one too. (See also the "Sitting Pretty" FAQ: http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/self-faq/#29.Sitting ) -------- SH: ... "(and what about the rest)?" ---- DS: That's what Interlibrary Loan was designed for. (If that does not call to mind "Qu'ils bouffent de la brioche," I don't know what will!) The point is that paid access refers to all forms of payment: subscription, site-license, and pay-per-view (which includes InterLibrary Loan). And "can't afford paid access" means: "can't afford access by any of these three means." (Please consult the ARL statistics again.) ------------ DS: "How can we be sure scholars will cite the right version, and that statistics will be pooled and credited to the published version?" -------- SH: "Leave it to the research community. They stand to lose even more than publishers if wrong versions are cited and citations are not credited to their publications." ---- DS: "I'll believe it when I see it. "They stand to lose" refers to authors whose work is being cited. "Wrong versions are cited" refers to different people, namely, authors of papers that cite this work. "Citations are not credited" refers to the people who control institutional repositories." Correct, and in the online age, with the full-texts of all articles freely accessible online, versions and citations will all be monitored, coordinated and optimised. Not to worry. And certainly not to use this worry as a pretext for not making all those articles freely accessible. Clearly this is a research community matter, between authors and authors (and their employing institutions and funders), not the ALPSP. ---- DS: "The rebuttal argues one thing ["Publishers giving away the full contents of the journal version (A) is not the same as authors self-archiving their final drafts (B)"] ...and then asserts a stronger thing (A has nothing whatsoever to do with B) as if these two things were the same, and they aren't. But I think this is a minor issue..." Yes it is a minor issue -- except if publishers try to use evidence from the one (full-journal give-aways) as grounds for delaying or diverting the other (single author-draft give-aways), as the ALPSP did. It is the evidence from the one that has nothing to do with the other. Stevan Harnad
DON SANNELLA:
I am disappointed by Stevan Harnad's treatment of what I intended as constructive input. I have attempted to respond to some very specific points in the rebuttal, as was very clearly stated in the first installment, and repeated in the second. But instead of discussing these specific points SH keeps repeating a bunch of stuff - with which I don't particularly disagree - that doesn't relate directly to the specific points under discussion, and attributing ridiculous positions to me that I never came close to taking. I think most of what he says in response is covered by the obvious observation that making stuff available on the internet makes it easier for people to refer to it, but of course I was never disputing that. When people claim to be making a logical argument I have a funny old-fashioned belief that the assertions made should be correct, arguments should not be logically fallacious, and so on. And so my original message was, as it stated, merely an attempt to challenge some (admittedly fairly minor) bits of the allegedly logical argument in the above rebuttal. I'm sorry I tried; it was obviously a mistake to attempt to contribute to this discussion. *Don Sannella**
STEVAN HARNAD:
---- Don Sannella wrote: "making stuff available on the internet makes it easier for people to refer to it" Not just to refer to it: to access the full-text, read it, use it, and build upon it. And not just easier: possible at all (for those who otherwise could not afford access). That is what the 50-250% citation impact advantage is about, not about making it easier to cite a 2nd-hand reference one has not read. And that in turn is what the RCUK mandate under discussion is for -- and what the discussion was about. Stevan Harnad
Open access self-archiving is not needed or intended solely or even primarily to enable either timely communication or access-longevity. It is to enable access itself, for all would-be users who cannot afford access to the journal version. Of course the access should also be immediate (hence the timeliness) and sustained into the future too (but the primary longevity burden is on the journal version for the time being, not the author's self-archived supplement).
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